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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 6842566" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Having spent the past ~year or so actually building up a set of recipes and refining my cooking techniques? I can completely understand it. One of the most surprising things I've learned over the past year: my parents never actually learned how to cook. They learned how to do a few rote recipes, some wrongly, and they both do things that completely fail to capitalize on the best aspects of the food they cook. They're great at improvising a simple meal from ingredients on hand, which made for many a good dinner when I was a child, but beyond that, they're no better cooks than I am (and, at this point, possibly worse) despite having three or four decades more practice. I *don't* expect most people to know how to cook, anymore. If you're really lucky, you'll have a friend whose mom is a trained chef or something (I had a friend like that growing up)--but that's not going to be most people.Beyond that, though? The food analogy is a bit weak because if you try your neighbor's barbecue, most of the time the worst that happens is you'll dislike it--the risk of food-borne illness is very low. But with D&D stuff, the equivalent of food-borne illness--a nasty, unpleasant surprise that crops up long after consumption--is, from my perusal of offerings made in 3e, dramatically higher. Food assaults the senses, and you can usually see, or smell, if it has a problem. Mechanics don't, not in the least.Mechanics are, to one degree or another, a kind of math. You can't see the color of math, smell it, taste a small bite; its down-the-line effects are often invisible even to true experts. You don't trust your neighbor's eyeballing to handle calculating the amount of wood and drywall you'll need for turning your back porch into a walled sunroom, nor with estimating the cost of installing a swimming pool. Your neighbor may be a fantastically nice person, may even be very skilled at math, but that doesn't equate to a thorough understanding of its applications in whatever field you need it.(There's also the whole "don't be rude to your neighbors" thing that doesn't at all apply, but I figure I've given enough reason why I don't think the analogy is actually a useful argument here.)</blockquote>

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